Of Remembering Old Wine: Dynamics of Influencing Others

What is Already Known About Behavioral Change and Product Engagement? A Look at Color Vision. Foundations for Wildfire Management et al. Volume 1, Essay Number Five.

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Introduction

What is already known that has the capacity to support processes of behavioral adoption and product engagement? Ample applicable insight can be found in the research of Dr. Humberto Maturana, whose work has been studied throughout the essays found on this blog. At any point in the history of Maturana’s work, there are any number of avenues that could be pursued. Particularly interesting is his research from the 1950s to the 1980s, where he was preoccupied with studying vision, with a unique attention on color vision, which is the focus here. Why color vision? Color vision research communicates something indicative of the relationship between humans and the world around them, and something taken as fundamental in it. The relationship indicated by this research is supportive of understanding behavioral adoption and product engagement. This essay slowly builds toward the notion of “bringing forth” the world around us, expanded upon in the next essay, which offers insight into the variability in willingness to adopt behaviors and use products.

Old Wine

Revisiting Maturana’s work from seventy years ago and more recently revitalizes an important perspective. A discussion of his older work was more recently shared in Maturana and Poerkson (2011), which pairs with the original publications for a comprehensive understanding. The purpose of this post is to examine Maturana’s color vision experiments to set an important foundation for the rest of this miniseries.

Color Vision

Initially, Maturana’s objective was to demonstrate how the colors of the external world, defined by their spectral composition for experimental replicability, correlate with what happens in the retina (Maturana & Poerksen, 2011). The goal was then to prove connections between colors and the retina's activities. Maturana supposed that he would be able to show an unmistakable correlation between the activity of the retina in the pigeon’s eye and color (Maturana & Poerksen, 2011).

Maturana was unable to prove the forecasted correlation (Maturana & Poerksen, 2011). It would be found that the experience of a colorful world is not connected to a correspondence between the wavelength structure of light emitted from the environment and the activity in the retina (Maturana & Varela, 1992).

Maturana recalled that names are arbitrary, and he was conscious of the fact that, as humans, we use the same color name for a wide array of color experiences (Maturana & Varela, 1992; Nelson, 2011). Meaning, the names we use to describe colors are signs of an individual’s experience of color and not color in some objective sense. Maturana engaged with the odd question of whether or not activity in the retina could be found to be linked with color names, which manifest in humans as a certain experience. Was there a possible internal correspondence between the happenings of the retina and different states of nervous system activity (Maturana & Poerksen, 2011)? Could the activity in the retina be correlated with the human color experience (Maturna & Varela, 1980)?

The task before Maturana, at which he succeeded, was to establish a different correlation, one between the retina and particular color experiences characterized by the use of a specific color name. Maturana’s experimental approach completely reversed the normative one of drawing a connection between the retina and colors external to it, and instead focused on what happened in the retina correlated with the subject’s color experience (Maturana & Varela, 1980; Maturana & Poerksen, 2011). The experience of a colorful world is not connected to the wavelength structure of light emitted from the environment, but rather a correlation between the naming of colors and nervous system activity (Maturana & Varela, 1992). Color is not something externally caused but rather triggered by a hue beyond the human, which leads to a certain experience distinguished by a name separate from an objective measurement of color. Color is a matter of internal rather than external correlations. Beyond color, these findings apply similarly to form, movement, texture, and other visual experiences (Maturana & Varela, 1992).

Maturana (1983) stated that it was possible to create the entirety of the human color space through his approach of corresponding the naming of colors with retinal activity and not the usual approach of correlating external colors with the retina. In an earlier article, Maturana, Uribe, and Frenk (1968) explained that it is impossible to generate the color space of humans by attempting to correspond retinal action with color. Instead, the color space can be created by correlating different patterns of varying types of cells in the retina with the name attributed to the color experienced by the subject (Maturana, 1983).

Conclusion

The above insights effectively closed the nervous system, which, including the human or non-human animal that embodies it, was previously considered to be an open information processing unit. By showing that changes in the nervous system (retinal cells) correlated with color naming and experience, and not the previously held idea that external color wavelengths correlated with changes represented in the retina, the nervous system was discovered to be closed. External stimuli can only perturb a human being and trigger, but not determine, what change occurs. It is the nervous system’s structure that determines what change, if any, will occur in the vast network of neuronal elements and how the present state will unfold into future states of activity. The closure of the nervous system will be the topic of the next short essay.

The conclusions about color vision drawn by Maturana and others are remarkable and have implications for product and communication design. More significantly, the findings of color vision are representative of how individuals find the world around them. The world cannot be objective, as it is not purely and “truthfully” communicated to the nervous system; rather, the nervous system brings forth the world around it based on its state the moment it encounters a stimulus such as a color. At the same time, humans do not construct the world as they wish it to be in an entirely subjective manner, as the world experienced is a matter of nervous system structure and activity and not purely decisions about what and how the world exists (Varela, 2006).

References

Maturana, H. R. (1983). What is to see? Archivo de Biología y Medicina Experimentales, 16(3-4), 255-269.

Maturana, H. R., & Poerksen, B. (2011). From being to doing: The origins of the biology of cognition (2nd ed.). (W. K. Koeck, & A. R. Koeck, Trans.) Kaunas, Lithuania: Carl-Auer.

Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1980). Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living (Vol. 42). (R. S. Cohen, & W. W. Marx, Eds.) Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company.

Maturana, H. R., Uribe, G., & Frenk, S. (1968). A biological theory of relativistic colour coding. Archivos de Biología y Medicina Experimentales, 1, 1-30.

Nelson, V. M. (2011). The specificity of immunologic observations. Constructivist Foundations, 6(3), 334-339.

Varela, F. J. (2006). Ethical know-how: Action, wisdom, and cognition. (T. Lenoir, & H. U. Gumbrecht, Eds.) Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.